The phrase “My Floating Archive” may seem incomprehensible at first, but as soon as we begin to explore the paintings in Panni Marosi’s latest series, this strange phrase quickly becomes clear. The objects, plants, and phenomena depicted in the works often have no clear connection to one another; they come together on the intensely colored canvases solely through the artist’s dreams, associations, and childhood memories. The latest cycle is organically linked in content to the paintings of the earlier series titled *Hypnos*, but the painterly quality of the new works is much more fluid; the scenes drift even further from reality and step into a surreal, stage-like landscape. This stage-like quality is reinforced by the curtains often floating at the edges of the paintings, or the canopies woven from plant tendrils, which envelop the image in a mysterious atmosphere at first glance.
In these dreamlike, fluid landscapes, it is not merely the principles of organic form-making that prevail, but also a kind of fluidity that defines and connects both natural and man-made forms; trees, chairs, the slag, or a braid of hair — all seem to obey the same arbitrary physical laws that exist only in this world. The fluid matter that defines the space and envelops everything binds the paintings together as a unified motif, at times floating and carrying the central scene, at other times flooding it. In some places, the fluid substance solidifies like porcelain; in others, solid rock transforms into a liquid state. Living and inanimate forms interplay with one another; the garden hose twists like a mythological hydra, the branches of the trees come together like braids, and a plant tendril, forming a fairy-tale dragon, winds its way through the center of the symmetrical composition. Compared to earlier works, the elements of the new series construct a more complex visual world in every respect, where the ancient motif of the “picture within a picture” underscores even more powerfully our suspicion that the paintings can only be interpreted within multiple layers of quotation marks. Thus, within its interpretive scope, there is room for both irony and the grotesque.
Among Marosi’s childhood memories, the Pannonian Sea — which appears in the stories of his grandfather, a miner — and its sediments from various eras played an important role; these reappear in his paintings as layered metaphors for his own memories and dreamscapes. The exploration of the workings of dreams occupies a prominent place in his creative method. The canvas can be interpreted primarily as a projection surface, where repressed or forgotten memories and emotions are organized into distinctive structures. In the creative process, the painting becomes a vessel for a coherent network of symbols, where layers of personal and collective meaning intertwine. It is therefore not surprising that Marosi’s art has been most strongly influenced by Surrealism — and, within that movement, by the works of Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy.
In these timeless landscapes, iconographic topos — distant from one another yet familiar — along with well-known everyday objects and, at other times, nostalgic ones, are placed side by side, while the overall effect is at once familiar and alien, banal and mysterious. The compositions are dense; the oversaturated, at times garish colors create an overwhelming effect. The works most often offer the possibility of interpretation, only to deny it again by invoking a distant reference. Overall, it can be said that eclecticism, as before, remains an important element of Marosi’s paintings, in which recurring symbols from his own iconography blend with the cultural, religious, and pseudo-spiritual symbols of our time — or even with the banal kitsch recognizable to everyone.
János Schneller